The Whole World

The show was in a karaoke bar. Not a gallery, not a ballroom—an actual karaoke bar near Alexanderplatz with the TV tower in view. You can’t signal venue choice more clearly than that.

William Fan had been talking for years about wanting to create a whole world, and at Berlin Fashion Week it felt like he was making that claim. The collection was called It’s Your Time to Shine, and the pieces believed in it. Sequined coats with actual structure. Tiger-print trenches. Kitten heels in lavender. Mohair cardigans, animal prints, cocktail dresses cut to the body. Even the sneakers—90s Puma Cell Enduras reworked with tassels and Swarovski crystals—refused to apologize for being too much.

Street fashion and luxury have always pretended to be enemies, which is strange because they’re the same impulse with different budgets. Fan seems to understand this without needing to state it. He takes nightlife pieces and tailors them without killing what makes them alive. The excess doesn’t become tasteful. It just sits better.

Berlin allows this kind of thing. The entire city is built on that principle—spaces remade into whatever you want them to be. Clubs in warehouses, parks on parking lots, runways in karaoke bars. There’s an understanding that you can take something and make it into what it should have been. Excess doesn’t apologize.

I don’t know if he’s trying to change fashion or just wants to stay inside the world he’s making. The collection suggests the latter, which is fine. There’s a kind of confidence in showing sequins and tiger print and saying, Yeah, exactly this—without hedging, without trying to make it smaller. That matters.